The myth of the perfect baby

  So this is the second installment, and it's not the middle of the night so maybe it'll make more sense. I left off at the Uh-Oh that changed my world. Remember, my first child had been a breeze, slept through the night early on, good eater, easy baby. My second child, not so much. We took him home at 3 days old, with very little idea how to feed him, but he couldn't get enough suction to latch on to breastfeed so that was a no go. They gave us these horrible nipple like things that had a tube at the end designed to feed extremely premature infants that can't handle the suck/swallow/breathe issue. They call them a "ross nipple". I have no idea how they work for preemie babies...but MY baby? HELL NO.    He refused to eat. By the time he was 5 days old he had gone from being his birth weight of 6 pounds 7 ounces to 5 pounds 10 ounces. He was starving. Thankfully we had his first of many visits to Children's Hospital. I remember the case nurse ...

  Let me go back to the beginning for you. When I was a kid, I wasn't one of those girls that played mommy and had a zillion dolls. I had never really wanted children, in fact, I didn't like them much. The older I got the more I realized that kids were not on my agenda at all. I had babysat for a few families, I had seen some family friends babies, I decided I just didn't like children enough to go through the hassle. Obviously somewhere along the lines I changed my mind! Through high school, I had a string of boyfriends. Like most teenage girls I "flirted" with the idea of being someone's wife. In the few years I dated high school boys I decided that was not a route I wanted to take either.    When I was 19 years old (barely) I had some gallstones and had to have my gallbladder removed. At the same time, they decided to do an appendectomy since they were already in there. Unfortunately, they severed one of my fallopian tubes on the way. When I wo...